Global Inequality Fades as the Global Economy Grows

In this “age of globalization,” countless studies offer confl icting conclusions about overall poverty rates and income inequality worldwide. All observers agree that the rapid integration of international economies is one of the dominant experiences of the post–Cold War world. Many critics have assailed globalization as a form of extreme capitalism that is leaving the world’s poor behind. At a conference in the fall of 2001, for example, Noam Chomsky declared that “Inequality is soaring through the globalization period—within countries and across countries.”1 To substantiate their claims, however, such anti-globalization activists rely on the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report for 1999, which claims that: